I was looking at the numbers up until about May/June of this year. What drove housing prices down before doesn’t seem to be driving them down now. You plentiful construction, relative to now. Construction workers haven’t recovered from 2008. There is still a running shortage of construction workers.
There is also a COVID backlog of started but not finished homes. Because supply chains were backed up. The cost of soft lumber, sheet goods, and milling are all near all-time highs. Once these homes start hitting the market, supply will go up and maybe prices will go down a little bit, but not 10-years-ago-low
If commercial real estate crashes then some of those investors might have to unload their residential assets to offset losses. That’s about the only scenario I can see where we get a sudden flood of supply.
Defaults on residential is still pretty low. Credit defaults are climbing but not outside of 1 std deviation, yet. Lease defaults are low. So with restricted supply, few being built, fewer workers, more expensive materials, and everyone paying their loans, I can’t see a sudden crash anytime soon. Also it doesn’t look like mortgage fraud (people lying about their identity or their worth) is particularly high either. Though that stat is much harder to track.
IMO housing prices will go up before the end of the year.
I think housing costs will stay high and the next “innovation” will be disposable housing or something vile. That’ll be the only way you can afford to own something. You buy a house you throw away in 10 years.
The purpose of your life is to be a productive asset for people who make their living owning productive assets. They are in charge of the government and the economy and will never vote themselves out. They will kill to maintain their status as owners of productive assets because they do not want to become owned by someone else. They do spend a lot of time making sure you’re over stimulated because not only do you make the product for them you also buy the product from them. You’re a little blood bag in multiple ways and they are leeches.
They need you to vote for them, to make their actions legitimate so the whole thing doesn’t erupt in violence and get them killed. The most effective way to do that is to build a bunch of windmills at which you’ll tilt. They can’t make you hate other people for owning productive assets, so they have to come up with other reasons. And those reasons also have to work in their favor, as in make you hate their competition and enemies. You hate their enemies, who also own productive assets, but you hate them for largely abstract reasons detached from the actual reality of your exploitation. This dissonance creates malaise unless you feel like you’re discovering a deeper truth by buying into more propaganda. You get on another dopamine treadmill which ultimately leaves you unsatisfied no matter how angry you get. Because it’s never about recognizing your actual situation.
They need you to keep making product for them, because if you run out of product to make, they lose their livelihood. You also need to keep buying product. They sell you everything you need, making sure there’s as many people between it and you as possible, each extracting some profit. This causes friction which causes malaise. Once everyone has everything they need, they don’t sell as much product. This is bad so they invent need, they try to make you want stuff so you keep buying. This means they need more productive assets like yourself, this grows their empire. They come up with more abstractions for why you’re unhappy and how buying product will satisfy you. But with the accumulation you are still left unfulfilled.
This isn’t new and owning productive assets isn’t as profitable as it used to be. You need more and more to make the same amount of money, to keep the same amount of power. So the expansion and accumulation of more involves people like yourself being made miserable. They need war to go into other places and take over those productive assets. They need you to be on board for war so they have to demonize the other productive assets like yourself. They need you to fight in the war so you lose your friends and family. But to make up for that they abstract that exploitation away with fictions as well.
A society that allows a few people to collectively own all or most productive assets (ie, labor) will always result in this malaise. It will never bring you contentment. And if, by some chance, you get to own productive assets are now happy because you’re free from being owned, millions of others will take your vacancy from the working class. So you’re happy but they are not and their discontent will ultimately bring conflict, which makes you unhappy again.
Human experience is not profitable, or I should say, it is. As you’ve noticed, the amount of human experience you can afford or make time for is almost none. Your entire human experience is consumption and production. Even when you have fun you must consume product. You must pay a series of people who own the productive assets that produce your enjoyment. Reality is not helpful to the owners of productive assets. It just gets in the way.
You can’t imagine an alternative because the prospect of another promise of freedom from being owned is just too scary. You’re better to go with the devil you know.
You’re not unhappy because you’re possessed with bad spirits. You’re not unhappy because of some abstraction living across the ocean that exists to threaten your other coveted abstractions. You’re unhappy for a precise and easily explainable material reason. That reason is that you are exploited and are actively prevented from stopping it. You are manipulated into believing that exploitation is actually freedom. So in chasing freedom you either further exploit yourself or exploit others, adding to the general friction of society and life, causing misery.